Single or many WoW installs?

[Sarduci]

Hello everyone!

I thought I'd make my first post something of interest on the performance front.

So, has there been any technical performance measurements taken of disk drive performance on single vs many installs?

If so, I have not been able to find it as of yet and would appreciate a link to it.

If not, I'd like to know if this is the proper part of the forum for this as I have some time to do system profiles this weekend when I'm on call since I'll be stuck at home.

Also, as a side note, I've not seen any study of read vs write disk access either to see which side of the disk I/O is higher. If anyone has any hard numbers for that I'd appreciate it.

Sarduci

[Diamndzngunz]

I have multiple installs. Seems more easy for me to manage addons and macros. Just depends on the person.

[opt]

Multiple folders is the way togo, just make 1 copy of wow you like and are happy with then just copy/paste if a couple of times
Plus the fact u dont need to type in your usernames each and every time!

[Ughmahedhurtz]

If you're a bit computer savvy, check this out: NTFS junction points ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=17763&highlight=junction#post17763')

Works like a charm.

[Droopz]

Multiple folders is the way togo, just make 1 copy of wow you like and are happy with then just copy/paste if a couple of times
Plus the fact u dont need to type in your usernames each and every time!

I run my main from 1 director on 1 drive and my 4 alts share a single directory on the other. Using keyclone to launch them I don't have to type in user names. Plus having the alts all sharing the 1 directory means I only have to setup most of the macros once.

I experimented with 5 seperate directories but zoning just killed me. Changing to this system i have now it blinks through load screen nice and fast.

[Sarduci]

If you're a bit computer savvy, check this out: NTFS junction points ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=17763&highlight=junction#post17763')

Works like a charm.Thanks for pointing that out. Most if not 80%+ of the data I work with is normally unique so I've never had to do look into something like that to save space; my normal motto is: Add another 14TB to the SAN! This sounds easy enough to do. I'll add it to my list of things to look at.

From my understanding of the software itself, all of the unique data per account and per toon is saved in a sub folder under \wtf\account folder. So far I've had no issues after a whopping 2 hours of play time with file read or write access errors (mental note to turn on file system audits) but I am not currently using anything other than the stock software.

Checking soft link performance vs single install vs 2, 3, 4, or 5 installs shouldn't be hard to do. Profiling for RAID0 or RAID1 performance should also be easy enough to do, but unfortunately I'd have to reload my OS to switch my controller to RAID from ACHI to look at that along with finding another disk drive.....

Oh well, at least I'll have something to do this weekend.

[glo]

I can't imagine you are going to see much if any difference in performance with multiple folders.

Keeping the wow files defragged and on the outer partition of your hard drive will definitely increase performance.

[Mudd]

Disk seek times are normally the load time killer for games like this. Defragging and putting it on the out edge of the partition will help increase bandwidth, but 5 folders worth of wow is still more seeks than necessary.

[Notes]

Running my 4 adds from 1 WoW folder, user names get added by Keyclone. Main got its own WoW folder on another HD. This results in having the same loading times as I have with just 1 character = My loads own other players loading times when on a ship or into a BG

[Feehza]

Two wow-folders for 5 Chars
1. char 1
2. char 2-4


When i start the toons, my start.bat copies the induvidual config-file to config.cfg and the induvidual maximizer-file to maximizer.ini.

I have much more performance than with 5 folders.

[Djarid]

hmm interesting... I think I will move to the 2 folder method

I had also already planned on using junction.exe but I get so little time at my PC atm that I would rather play than config ;)

[Sarduci]

Disk seek times are normally the load time killer for games like this. Defragging and putting it on the out edge of the partition will help increase bandwidth, but 5 folders worth of wow is still more seeks than necessary.That is why running one has to be more efficient than running 5 different installs. Seeking to read from 5 different locations at the same time vs reading data that's probably stashed in the cache from a single point on the drive should show a major decrease in overall seeks.

It is interesting to see all of the different setups that people do have.

[Chorizotarian]

hmm interesting... I think I will move to the 2 folder method

I had also already planned on using junction.exe but I get so little time at my PC atm that I would rather play than config ;)

I tried this but had to give it up because of macros and addon settings from one clone stomping on the others. If you use symbolic linking you can get all of the benefits of running from a single directory without the pain.

[Nairi]

huge differene with 1 hd per wow sessions 8o

[keyclone]

if you are looking for performance, i'm not sure you'll see much of a gain by spreading files across the same drive. you still have the same bottleneck... a single read head on the drive

for performance, i would generally consider multiple drives and spread your wow folders across them.
this would give you multiple read heads focused on pulling the files, which would radically improve the read times.

i had posted a thread to start discussing such a solution here:
5x wow box spec (current: $1,639 +s/h+tax) ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=39938#post39938')

general wisdom seems to lean away from multiple drives today... with the SATA drives being enough.
i have not tried to compare yet... i'm still spec'ing. i figured you'd like to check out the info

oh, and welcome to the boards, Sarduci! nice first post :D

[BobGnarly]

I can't imagine you are going to see much if any difference in performance with multiple folders.

Keeping the wow files defragged and on the outer partition of your hard drive will definitely increase performance.It's been mentioned already, but just to chime in, you will actually see a huge difference in performance - for the worse. I had a lot of problems with zoning and loading and whatnot until I moved everything to two folders (main account in one, slaves in the other). Much smoother since then.

[Mudd]

hmm interesting... I think I will move to the 2 folder method

I had also already planned on using junction.exe but I get so little time at my PC atm that I would rather play than config ;)

I tried this but had to give it up because of macros and addon settings from one clone stomping on the others. If you use symbolic linking you can get all of the benefits of running from a single directory without the pain.

You need to setup junctions for the subfolders and not the entire wow folder. Basically you want to share the data files, and have seperate config files (wtf/addons). If I end up with some time I may try and setup a page on the wiki on how to do this. Be warned that you can accidentaly do weird things if you forget that folders are 'junctioned'. Patch day might cause you troubles if you launch 5 clients at once.

[Sarduci]

Well, here's the numbers from testing, averaged over 3 tests each of flying to the Wetlands then hearthstone back to SW. The data was taken from a 10 second snapshot after they all transported:

Single install: Max current disk queue length of roughly 43
Single disk using junction points: Max current disk queue length of roughly 43
Five installs, after defrags: Max current disk queue length of roughly 273

Average disk queue lengths we the same sort of result since sitting in the Wetlands gives me a disk queue length of 0:
Single install: Average disk queue length of roughly 6 at the end of 10 seconds
Single disk using junction points: Average disk queue length of roughly 6 at the end of 10 seconds
Five installs, after defrags: Average disk queue length of roughly 83 at the end of 10 seconds

For the non-techie folks, a current disk queue length of more than 8 per disk drive in your computer is unacceptable for high access applications such as databases. An average disk queue length of over 8 per disk over time is the same, not good for high performance. We're not exactly running a high performance application here, but anything above that baseline will tell you than you're system is waiting for your hard drives to catch up.

Now, for actual application of the numbers, it took less than 3 extra seconds for everything to show up and render on my system. Is three extra seconds going to matter for PVE, probably not. For PVP arena teams? Probably not. Normal in game performance worked just fine for all of them.

Read operations consisted of roughly 98% of the disk I/O that I tracked over the course of doing this all. Read and write disk I/O was all in short bursts, and considering how my page file was not being used for anything this is mostly (a little system and background things happening) straight WoW disk usage. The only time there were any kind of big or noticeable writes to disk were when shutting down clients. Addons will affect this number, the only things I currently have installed is x-perl. Running auctioneer or something that logs data like that may significantly change that percentage.

For all intensive purposes, single installs or junction points were the same. Multiple installs performed worse, but that is relative since the delay was minimal. You would probably find a bigger bottleneck on RAM or CPU on the average system. All in all, a wash in my book.

Space wise, single installs or junction points were the exact same size. Multiple installs were 400% larger than the single install or junction points. Personally I hate haven't redundant data on my systems.

Disk performance of a RAID1 for faster read rates would be better than RAID0; but the overall performance of a RAID1 measured against a single disk drive is the same as or worse in some areas such as write rates unless you are using a hardware based RAID controller that is running as store and forward vs a pass through configuration. All in all, I'd have to call that a wash.

Sorry it took longer than I thought to get this all, was a bit of a busy day on Sunday for work. Had to finish up the testing on the multiple installs on Monday night.

[keyclone]

@Sarduci

very interesting numbers. btw, where did you get the disk queue length?

did you try individual disks with an install on each? this would be different then stripped RAID as the type of access from 5 wows would all be targeting the same file, so disk contention would probably not work out well as they would all be queuing up for the same file (unless the caching helped.. which it should in theory... hmmm)

but as of now, a single install serving multiple wows on 1 drive is about the best performance you saw?

[Sarduci]

@Keyclone

No, unfortunately my last computer was all IDE, and I only purchased a single disk for this system. I was planning on adding more disks if I needed the for space more than anything since I'll be running a lot of virtual machines on there for work to look into 2008 server core services install. (Can't wait for the MS roadshow so I can get my free copy! ../forum/images/smilies/thumbsup.png)

Disk queue length was taken from Perfmon in Windows since it's a built in tool to any install. It was logged to another system remotely so the disk I/O for permon would not show up in the charts. There were two physical disk counters that I used, current disk queue length and average disk queue length. Then I'd export it to a CSV file and use a VB macro I'd format the data and parse it that way.

Well, best performance was a mixed bag. I'd have to say that there is no clear advantage in single drive or RAID for my particular hardware. Less RAM or more instances running would change the numbers. Multiple installs were not as good in mine, but the overall performance was not bad.

[Tonuss]

I'm intrigued at the prospect of putting the four alts in a single WoW folder instead of four. But performance so far has been acceptable (aside from the time I spent in Shattrath City... sheesh). Also, I have two of the four one one SATA drive, and the other two on another.

With current motherboards sporting anywhere between four and eight SATA ports, and with SATA using separate channels for each drive, a future multi-boxing system could contain four relatively small (and thus inexpensive) SATA drives, each with its own WoW installation. Hrm, I'd better stop or I'll start browsing NewEgg again...

[Zite83]

I run 3 and sometimes 5 (my two room mates) from one folder.. I haven't noticed any performance problems of any kind. Might give it a shot with 2 or more folders to see what happens.... Right now what is killing me is my hard drive... Just upgraded my computer big time and now I am starting to notice my old hard drive slowing down my everything.

[Gallo]

So, I want to throw my story into the fray. I've been 5-boxing for quite awhile now (ran a "pve" group Pr/Ma/Ma/Lock/Warr to lvl55 before I realized that I really wanted a PVP group, and now have 5 shamans to 56) and ever since I started I've used the 5 separate folders of WoW method. I always read that the performace was slighty better doing that, and that its easier to keep track of mods and such for clones.

Well, using this method I always MAJORLY lagged in IF and i could not use Boats as a method of transportation because the boat would be pulling away from the destination before my load screen would finish on all 5.

For shits and giggles this weekend, I was reading this thread and decided "Hey, maybe I'll try 5 WoWs from the same folder. A few changes in my keyclone command editor and I was up and running. Holy crap what a difference. Everything loads so much faster. Instances/zoning/boat rides/logging in/logging off/etc.

For now, I'll be sticking to this method.

Just my 2c.

[Bluepants]

I used to go with 4 wows in 4 folders, for the sake of macroes and addons.
However i have 5 seperate disks in my system, so last night i decided to test 4wow each on seperate drives.
And the difference was INSANE! i mean.. For example: Flying from HH to shatt, used to be a laggy experience, and when i landed i shatt i ususally had to wait 1-3minutes to see the structures, and 4-5 to see the first NPC. But with 4 disks i saw the flightmaster as i landed!
I can do some more testing tonight, clock some load times. (portal to exodar, IF and SW with a fresh system)

[Djarid]

Ok, I changed my 5 wow folders to 2 folders (on separate disks)

Well nearly... I deleted the DATA and Patches folders in 3 of my installations and used junction.exe to create reparse points instead.

WOW what an improvement in load times... previously my main would be waiting around for the clones to come online but now all 4 clones come online together a second or so before my main. A significant improvement.

Some of this performance increase must be down to the disk cache on the drive (8Mb on mine), as each client must be requesting the same information in a very similar timeframe the disk can probably service all 4 requests in a similar time to a single one. This prevents the head seeks that the drive would have had to do previously.

[Sarduci]

Some of this performance increase must be down to the disk cache on the drive (8Mb on mine), as each client must be requesting the same information in a very similar timeframe the disk can probably service all 4 requests in a similar time to a single one. This prevents the head seeks that the drive would have had to do previously. You are correct sir! 8)

Glad to see my work helped the above people out.

To comment on the 6 or 8 port SATA boards, running multiple drives in that scenario may give a slight advantage in exchange for a higher electrical requirement and the need for better system cooling which may need power requirements (and a whole different set of issues when you go high end) of its own. I may add another single drive to my system and move WoW to that, but only after i find some way to fill the 200GB worth of empty space I have right now.

If anyone has any data to the opposite, please share that also and maybe we can make some suggestions as to why.

[Lynly]

OK, stupid question, but it has to be asked. I know a bunch of tools to defrag my drive, but how does one move an entire folder to the edge of the hard disk?

[Taipan]

Ok, I changed my 5 wow folders to 2 folders (on separate disks)

Well nearly... I deleted the DATA and Patches folders in 3 of my installations and used junction.exe to create reparse points instead.

WOW what an improvement in load times... previously my main would be waiting around for the clones to come online but now all 4 clones come online together a second or so before my main. A significant improvement.

Some of this performance increase must be down to the disk cache on the drive (8Mb on mine), as each client must be requesting the same information in a very similar timeframe the disk can probably service all 4 requests in a similar time to a single one. This prevents the head seeks that the drive would have had to do previously.

Greetings,

This sounds like a very interesting thing to try (I have a 10k raptor) but I'd really hate myself if I screw it completely and have to do a full 5 WoW installs + patches + Macro setups + Keyclone etc.

- @Djarid, my immediate question around Junction is : apart from saving disk space, is there any benefit in deleting Data and Patches files in previously used 3 folders ?
(the idea is to try with junction and if it doesnt deliver, just delete the junctions and immediatly go back to 5 directories).
I assume you wrote those Junction examples in the Wiki.

- @ all, 2nd question : how about going for Main on Raptor and 2 alts on 2nd Sata drive and 2 alts on 3rd Sata ?

- 3rd one : there are Sata 16Go SSD (Solid State drives) for under 300 Euros now while a typical WoW client is around 10Go (uncleaned).
Those claim access time about 100 times faster than most regular drives and most reviews seem to confirm a gigantic leap indeed.
Could this be the ultimate solution for 5 accounts -with Junction- while OS stays on Raptor ?

*already has the credit card in hand, ready to shoot* :D

/salute

[pb13]

Just a note on solid state drives, their seek times are effectively zero (no physical motion), however, continuous read/write speeds are on par and sometimes worse than even some of the 7200rpm drives. Its something to think about given the price per gigabyte compared to good old hard disks.

[Taipan]

Greetings,

Here's my update on this Junction hint.

I was suspicious -ie concerned this may screw my setup and require a full reinstall- but implemented it and all I can say is WOW !: 5 boxes load in less than 5 sec (vs. up to 1 min before or even worse in Shattrah).
Entering AV is immediate and I don't lose an alt on /follow anymore due to loading times while running around.
Simply the best advice ever to boost 5-boxes performance (and it's free :thumbsup: )

I did it the old fashion way : emptied the Data folder on wow2 - 5 directories and "junction" them all to the WoW1 Data folder.
Thus I keep 5 directories with dedicated macros and add-ons.
Note 1: junction.exe must be placed at c:\ root and you access it through the old Dos "command" window. It will list all command options when you first type "junction" there.
Note 2 : data folders on WoW2-5 must be emptied first or Junction will fail (I put their content in "databackup" folders for the sake of safety).
Note 3 : there's a basic Junction page in the Wiki here with the typical command to use for us Mboxers.
If you feel the need to delete the junction link, use the junction delete command (as opposed to deleting the junctioned data folder with File Manager : it may work or it may bring chaos, pretty touchy thing that I didn't even think of daring to consider to try ;( )

I'll order a SSD Sata 16go drive to install the Data folder there for my 5 clients and see if this can boost even more the performance of 5-boxes.
I understand that SSD drives don't deliver better than most Sata drives, especially Raptors, when it comes down to write speeds.
But I assume -maybe incorrectly as I'm a poorly IT skilled person- that Data files are just read, not written.

Again : best performance boosting advice -for software Mboxers- I found here, simply brilliant.
Thanks to all of you who found it, shared it and explained it.

/salute

[Sam DeathWalker]

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/12/cheap_raid_ravages_wd_raptor/page8.html

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Dosnt' seem much advantage to SSD yet ... or am I reading the specs wrong? Might be able to get by with 8 gigs for eq though....

[Sarduci]

Access Time: 0.1 ms In this application, this is the only advantage. Random seek time in standard drives is <10ms. SSD's have no moving parts and therefor in a high random I/O scenario they are perfect. In large sequential reads, SSD's are less than ideal since traditional drives have a much higher sustained throughput rate.

We looked at this for database applications at work but we are out pacing the drive growth by 2 to 3 times what they are increasing in size. Temp DB logs run stupid fast off of these things though.....

Personally, my next laptop will be SSD, but that's for the power consumption savings, nothing to do with the drive speeds.

SSD's will start to be more common over the next 3 to 5 years as price/unit comes down.

[marvein]

with how cheap drive space is I didnt bother with anything fancy, i just kept making copies. I have about 7-8 unique wow folders on my computer. 3 on one hard drive and 4 on another. initially it was just 6, 1 for my default in program files and then 5 for the 5box team to give me more macros. but then I was having issues with my mains and wanted to keep certain addons seperate since I dual box a lot using different addons so I split them up again lol. Seek times arent bad but Im thinking of spliting them off again now that I have ventured into shattrah and having 10 people constantly following me has been creating problems lol. -_-

*edit* I think im going to look into shrinking my 5boxers from 5 directories down to 2 and moving them to seperate drives. there shouldnt be an issue with macros since macros/keybindings are on a per account basis. This will require some testing but hopefuly it improves things a lot. Might even put the clones on a raptor to make them even better since SSD's are still way too pricey.

[marvein]

@Keyclone

No, unfortunately my last computer was all IDE, and I only purchased a single disk for this system. I was planning on adding more disks if I needed the for space more than anything since I'll be running a lot of virtual machines on there for work to look into 2008 server core services install. (Can't wait for the MS roadshow so I can get my free copy! ../forum/images/smilies/thumbsup.png)

Disk queue length was taken from Perfmon in Windows since it's a built in tool to any install. It was logged to another system remotely so the disk I/O for permon would not show up in the charts. There were two physical disk counters that I used, current disk queue length and average disk queue length. Then I'd export it to a CSV file and use a VB macro I'd format the data and parse it that way.

Well, best performance was a mixed bag. I'd have to say that there is no clear advantage in single drive or RAID for my particular hardware. Less RAM or more instances running would change the numbers. Multiple installs were not as good in mine, but the overall performance was not bad.

you got some intersting numbers there but I was wondering if you could do the same tests when riding a boat/zepplin or going through the portals in shattrah. Those two things are what have been killing me recently, especially the portals thing.

[Taipan]

*edit* I think im going to look into shrinking my 5boxers from 5 directories down to 2 and moving them to seperate drives. there shouldnt be an issue with macros since macros/keybindings are on a per account basis. This will require some testing but hopefuly it improves things a lot. Might even put the clones on a raptor to make them even better since SSD's are still way too pricey.Greetings,

I tried that initially : keeping WoW1 on its own and junctioning 2-5 on WoW2. It was very nice but not uber.

But when I junctioned 2-5 on WoW1 (ie. all 5 clients reading Data on the same folder), then it turned magic indeed : it felt like I was playing on a solo client.

Raptor are fast but noisy : you can tell when it works. And it's just really quieter now 8)

Also, Sam's link to Tom Hardware is a good reminder that SSD aren't that an obvious bullet-proof of a solution for our application, thank you for that.
I think I'll hold for a bit and get a more decent CPU cooler from Sigmatek to start doing proper O/C on the Quad 6600.

Especially since the new generation of Quads 45n from Intel (aka 9450 and so on) seem to have a lower fixed multiplier (8x vs. 9x) and O/C capability than the 6600, with current motherboards (something about FSB 1800mhz vs. 1333mhz).
Too geeky for an old last-gen fart like me but here's the thread if you enjoy the talk :thumbsup:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/247202-10-q6600-wait-q9450-e8400

/salute

[marvein]

*edit* I think im going to look into shrinking my 5boxers from 5 directories down to 2 and moving them to seperate drives. there shouldnt be an issue with macros since macros/keybindings are on a per account basis. This will require some testing but hopefuly it improves things a lot. Might even put the clones on a raptor to make them even better since SSD's are still way too pricey.Greetings,

I tried that initially : keeping WoW1 on its own and junctioning 2-5 on WoW2. It was very nice but not uber.

But when I junctioned 2-5 on WoW1 (ie. all 5 clients reading Data on the same folder), then it turned magic indeed : it felt like I was playing on a solo client.

Raptor are fast but noisy : you can tell when it works. And it's just really quieter now 8)

Also, Sam's link to Tom Hardware is a good reminder that SSD aren't that an obvious bullet-proof of a solution for our application, thank you for that.
I think I'll hold for a bit and get a more decent CPU cooler from Sigmatek to start doing proper O/C on the Quad 6600.

Especially since the new generation of Quads 45n from Intel (aka 9450 and so on) seem to have a lower fixed multiplier (8x vs. 9x) and O/C capability than the 6600, with current motherboards (something about FSB 1800mhz vs. 1333mhz).
Too geeky for an old last-gen fart like me but here's the thread if you enjoy the talk :thumbsup:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/247202-10-q6600-wait-q9450-e8400

/salute

Ya Ive already binned the raptor idea, they are just too much money for what they are, and id much rather have an SSD anyways but Im not going to shell out for that either.
Basically what my setup right now looks like is this
c:\program files\world of warcraft
c:\WoW\
d:\Warcraft\Primary
d:\Warcraft\Secondary
d:\Warcraft\WOW3
d:\Warcraft\WOW4
d:\Warcraft\WOW5
Now I dont run all these at once lol. the one in c\prog\blah blah is the main default install where I play my mains (druid/huter/rogue/etc) the one in root of C is if Im on my main and I need one of my alts online to do whatever, be it some arena/bg, item transfer, crafting, etc. I did this one recently because some addons (like auctioneer) were throwing errors left and right when being run twice from same set of files. The directories on D are my multibox army. Despite it being named secondary there is nothing special about that one. I did that initially with the plan of completely moving my main WoW folders over to this drive but I decided against it due to addon configuration. So I think what I am going to do is move the primary over to the root of C instead of the one there and then merge secondary->5 into one directory and launch my alts from there. Doing this should help eliminate some oddities I have with my addons and get them all nice and normalized. And doing this really should help performance not to mention free up space for FRAPS :D I just hope I dont have to redo too much of my config if I were to do this.

[Dorffo]

thanks much for the junction info folks... best performance boost i have tried yet

[Spudgun]

Having played for the last 6 months with 4 wow directories ive just changed to the 1 main install and 1 for the other 3 chars (2 wow folders in total) and the speed increase at loading is massive. Cant believe ive only just done it, all those Spuds losing there way so many times in shattrath - not any more.

Thanks for the big improvement :)